Sandburg, Carl - Harriet Monroe (review date 1916)

Harriet Monroe (review date 1916)

SOURCE: Monroe, Harriet. Review of Chicago Poems, by Carl Sandburg. Poetry: A Magazine of Verse 8, no. 2 (May 1916): 90-93.

[In the following review of Chicago Poems, Monroe characterizes Sandburg's work as “a masterpiece of portraiture” that ranges from the “rugged” to the “exquisitely delicate.”]

In this American melting-pot the English language becomes the mother tongue of the sons of Perse and Slav and Swede; and through that language, and the literature born in it, more and more as time goes on, must blow tropic and arctic airs, winds from East and West, perfumes of Araby and salt spray from the northern seas. No prophet can measure the ultimate enrichment of our art through this enrichment of our racial strain. Provincialism will hardly survive, and our democracy of precepts and precedents—an Anglo-Saxon inheritance, like our language, from the patterned and fenced-in...

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